Based on this trend, it’s critical to know how customers view your product and your competition so you can target your marketing efforts accordingly.

Thinking like a mystery shopper can provide you with some helpful tactics to keep in mind:

1.    Do a price check: At the most basic, a mystery shopper can tell you how your pricing compares to the competition. However, a price check is more than comparing only the advertised price. For example, shipping charges, discounts at “check-out,” etc. can make a difference. Do you know how your final price compares with your competitors? Marketing compliance is also important to make sure your list price and sale price match your check-out price.

2.    Check what’s in stock: A mystery shopper can tell you if your competition offers additional colors, styles and inventory or if you have the most diverse offering. Know where you stand so you can make sure you’re offering what the market is interested in and not losing out on prospective customers.

3.    Evaluate your customer service: A good mystery shopper will evaluate their customer service and Web site experience: how long it took to reach someone by phone, how long it took for an email response, how friendly and helpful representatives were. However, it’s equally important to monitor what’s being said about you and your service on popular consumer review sites, blog postings, social networks and online customer service forums. These conversations allow you to know exactly where you are doing a good job, where you need work and where you are at risk. With this information you can easily direct your marketing campaigns more effectively to win new customers and delight your returning customers.

4.    Compare promotions: A mystery shopper would look to see what promotions your competitors are offering, such as free shipping, two-for-one and other incentives. In addition, many sites are providing another level of discounts credited with codes at the checkout. These aren’t always easy to find, but it’s important to know what discounts are available and how complex these offers are for customers to use. Promotions can be a cost effective way to make customers feel like they’re getting more, make sure you’re offerings are attractive as others out there.

5.    Do localization: Localization is an important concept to be on the popular green band-wagon. Look to see if you and your competitors serve local offerings. This can range from local promotions to highlighting locally sourced foods or materials. By looking at mystery shopper’s “virtual cart” you can determine what national and “local” brands are in the product mix, and identify if you are devoting enough marketing effort to your own local brand. You can determine if the competition is zoning its prices and what markets are being used to drive margin vs. those that are driving sales.

6.    Count the clicks and categories: How many clicks does it take to get to your product? How many categories is your product in? Search for the product on your site and on your competitors’ sites to see how many results come up on each one, and count how many clicks it takes to get to the product. It’s crucial to ensure your categories are optimized for ease of use and browsing. If it takes longer to reach your product than your competitors, you may be losing customers to the clutter. The same goes for steps to checkout. Just as a long line in a brick and mortar store can deter customers, a long checkout process online can do the same.

7.    Monitor your brand: Does your brand position support your initiatives? Monitor the lifecycles of new items to understand how your own brand is positioned overall. Knowing what brands have new items and what brands are appearing in discount, luxury and impulse segments ensures that your brand isn’t being eroded by price or virtual shelf space.

8.    Look beyond online horizon: You may be focused on the online experience, but if you or your competitors have brick and mortar stores, you will want to take into account how the prices, promotions, customer service and inventory compare with the online offerings. The online marketplace tends to be the leader as to what gets rolled out to the brick and mortar, so knowing what your competitors are doing online can help you predict what their next steps might be in their stores.

9.    Audit aggregator promotions: Successful online marketing goes beyond your own site’s services. Over the past five years, retailers have moved advertising and promotion budgets aggressively to online mediums and in particular, to aggregator sites such as Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Nextag and even Amazon.com. It’s important for marketers to know if they are getting what they pay for, their reputation (are you a 3 or 5 star seller?) and how their results show up in these searches.

10.    Monitor the whole segment: Knowing the depth and breadth of the site and monitoring the changes will allow you to identify the effort a site is devoting, or not devoting, to keeping and enticing customers.

It’s true that even the best mystery shopper would have their work cut out for them if they were to tackle all these items as well as provide real-time analysis and actionable data. Fortunately, there are a variety of market intelligence companies that offer these services and are faster and less expensive than a mystery shopper. If you decide to go with a market intelligence company, make sure they can collect both structured and unstructured data (such as in forums, charts, graphs and other Web formats) and offer the data in an easy-to-use format that doesn’t require an IT person to interpret it for action.

At the very least, thinking like a mystery shopper will help your marketing efforts. After all, the most effective marketing happens when you put yourself in the customers’ shoes. You’ll be glad that you did.

Bazaarvoice, a company that specializes in hosting social commerce applications that aim to boost sales, today launched Bazaarvoice ReStyle, a flexible content styling tool that allows online marketers to customize content of surveys in holiday and seasonal promo blitzes, contests, cross-channel campaigns and Web site redesigns.

Marketers can use the tool to integrate Bazaarvoice’s social commerce content with multichannel marketing campaigns – display options can also be tweaked.

“The ability to provide a more flexible and dynamic way to display user-generated content is critical to brands that want to create a specific look-and-feel for the content on their sites and streamline all marketing campaigns around a central theme,” said Sam Decker, CMO of Bazaarvoice.

The catch? You have to be a client. ReStyle is immediately available to all current Bazaarvoice clients free of charge.

The company offers outsourced technology, services, analytics and expertise to help companies enhance online shopping experiences with social commerce applications that drive sales. Bazaarvoice’s clients include Dell, Macy’s, Office Depot, Inc., Overstock.com, QVC and PETCO.

The company launched its new search engine and Web site a few weeks ago – a study (performed by the company, so the findings should be taken with a grain or 10 of salt) found that 55% of participants preferred Gigablast’s search results over those of Google.

Web site operators can provide free searches to their visitors with Gigablast’s search system. “The most frequent complaint regarding alternative site search services is the freshness of the site search results,” Marcus Ruark, vice president of sales and marketing for Gigablast said. Gigablast “provides a tremendous search advantage to Web sites with dynamic, user-generated content, frequent page updates or regular sales promotions.”

Gigablast was founded in 2000 and it provides natural, algorithmic search services, including consumer Web search, XML Web search feeds, hosted search and customized search software. The new search service is free and available immediately.

The New York Times reported today that Pepsi-Cola North America is unveiling a new calorie-free, carbonated beverage called Tava with its own Web site (www.tava.com), banner ads, promotions and sampling events. (Tava will also be sent gratis to tech-happy employees of Google, Apple and MTV).

One of the reasons Pepsi’s approach is so revolutionary: Tava is not supposed to be the new hotness for Paris Hilton compatriots. The caffeine-free, fruit-flavored drink is being aimed squarely at the minivan brigade — the 35 to 49 demographic, The Times reports.

“There used to be an assumption this target was not online,” Frank Cooper, vice president for flavored carbonated soft drinks at Pepsi told The Times. “But there’s a group in that category that’s ‘reborn digital.’ They’ve lived through the change and learned to adapt to it. This consumer spends significant time online, although what they do may differ from the younger consumer. They’re not I.M.-ing their friends; they’re looking at e-mail or looking up information about travel, music, food.”

Tribal DDB Worldwide, the digital arm of DDB Worldwide, is handling the campaign. Banner ads will reportedly appear on AOL, chow.com, CitySearch, oprah.com, People and weather.com, among other sites.